Self Employed Success

Creating your own mastermind group, whether for your own participation or as a for-profit service that you offer to others, will help you to grow your business. There are many factors that impact the success of your mastermind group, but one of the most important is the selection of the participants. Who do you want to be part of your dream team?

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Several times today, I received an email in my various email Inboxes, asking for personal information. The email looks something like this (below). DO NOT respond to email scams like this. Never, never give out your login ID or password via email (think about it: shouldn’t the email company already have this?), and never, never, never give out your birth date:

This Email is from Hotmail Customer Care and we are sending it to every Hotmail Email User Accounts Owner for safety. We are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of hotmail accounts so we are shutting down some hotmail accounts and your account was among those to be deleted.

It goes on from there to ask for all kinds of personal information. In fact, that’s a great test to see whether it’s a scam or not. There’s no reason why Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo or AOL should need your birth date. When people start asking for your password, that’s the time to say to yourself, “Uh oh! This is fishy!”  (Or is it “Phishy”?)

Did you know that your laptop, cell phone charger, computer monitor, and printer can draw electricity, even when they’re not turned on? This is also true of items around your home: your television, cable TV box, and other power tools. This is called Phantom Power, or sometimes Phantom Energy or Standby Power.

When some electrical items are plugged into a socket, they pull electricity even when they’re not turned on. This wastes electricity and increases your electric bill but doesn’t benefit you at all.

Discovery.com has a great article entitled “Save Energy by Avoiding Phantom Power” that is very helpful and includes links to other Green Living articles. They say that phantom power can account for as much as 10% of the electricity an office or home uses. Wow!

Here’s what we’ve done in our office to reduce the amount of phantom energy drawn:

1. Put all items that draw phantom energy, like our laser printers, computer speakers, and computer monitors on a power strip, which we turn off each night.
2. Unplug items we don’t use every day, like cell phone chargers.
3. Pay attention when recharging items like laptops, and remove them from the charger when the battery is full (instead of leaving it on charge all night).
4. Turn off items when not in use. For instance, I use my laser printer all the time, but only use my color printer occasionally. Why pull power for a color printer that I use once a week?
5. Always look for energy-saving devices when replacing an item.

Here’s the key with running a Green Office: all these little items DO add up to big savings and a decrease on natural resources. It’s worth doing.

I usually fly out of either Philadelphia or Newark airports. They’re both “okay” airports, better than some, worse than others.

But when I flew into Las Vegas airport last week, I was unaware that I’d have the airport customer-centric experience of my life. I’m not naive — I know that airports are all about moving people and luggage as efficiently as possible. But they’ve created a system that works both for the airport as a business AND for the customer.

First thing that happens, as you’re exiting the plane, they display for you which luggage carousel your luggage will arrive at. What a relief! Many airports make you search for this information instead of handing you the information at exactly the logical time you’ll be wanting it.

Next, the bathrooms. If you’ve been in airport bathrooms, you know that they’re not the cleanest or best maintained places on earth. Not true in Las Vegas. The bathroom was sparkling clean and in perfect repair. The faucets work, the soap dispenser works, the towel dispenser works. I’m in bathroom heaven.

Luggage is picked up in a central location for all terminals. The airport has an efficient system for moving lots of people to the luggage area without delay or long walks. (Well, “long walks” in any airport is relative, but you get my point.)

Finally, to my delight, there was an employee at the luggage carousel, lifting up each piece of luggage as it arrived and putting it handle-up so that people could easily grab their suitcase without struggle.

Each step along the way, I was delighted by these simple things. And it reminds me how my customers deserve the same treatment. From the way we answer emails or the phone, to how we invoice customers, every step, every contact matters.